Otherness (26 page)

"Hell."

I told myself I was getting up to fetch a drink . . . then go to the can . . . then look in the closet for my tennis shoes. . . . Maybe I'd go outside for an old-fashioned walk. . . .

I found the sneakers where I'd left them, near the crack in the closet wall. Leaning close, I heard soft sounds coming from the room next door—my wife's private sanctum.

They weren't sounds of conversation, but exertion, heavy breathing.

Well, gatherers also used to work hard, netting fish, cutting wild grain
. . . .

I knew I was rationalizing as I brought my eye to the crack.

Wearing helmet and bodysuit, Gaia squatted much as the last time I had seen her in this place, hands outstretched and down before her, as if grasping something. Underneath, the treadmill-floor mimicked an oblong hummock, which she straddled while strenuously rocking back and forth. Whatever she was doing in her private world, it apparently involved a lot of effort, for her head rocked back and I heard her moan aloud.

I knew that sound. I looked again at the shape beneath her and saw that it recreated no patch of ground, no fallen log. Even without goggles for seeing, earphones for hearing, or gloves for touching, I could discern the outline of a man.

I needed those sneakers, after all. I left at once and took a walk along the sky bridges lacing the gray metropolis at the forty-story level, overlooking the maze of transport tubes and vibrating machinery that keeps the city alive. Looking up past the towering canyon walls off Chitown, I could see no stars, just a hazy glow diffused by pollutant haze. Late at night I should have been grateful for the countless Public Safety cameras, peering from each lamppost. But they only made me feel conspicuous,
supervised
. On the veld you don't fear being victimized by a million strangers. Twenty thousand years ago there
were
no strangers. All you needed was your tribe.

I ducked into a bar. The beer was excellent, the atmosphere depressing. Other men sat nursing drinks, scrupulously avoiding eye contact with those around them. A wire-o in the corner kept dropping quarters into a stim-zap machine, then sticking his head under the hood for direct jolts of electric pleasure. His sighs were sterile, emotionless.

Gaia's had been throaty, lusty.

Now I knew where she had learned that provocative swaying motion—the one she'd used the last few times we made love. Apparently she had a tutor, a good one. One I would never meet, let alone get to punch in the face.

Fair is fair
, I thought. Hadn't I already rationalized my own encounter with sex-by-simulation, before finding out that Gaia was doing it first? If it fell into the category of masturbation for me, and not infidelity, then why not her?

That's different
!—part of me replied. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see how. My "rival" was a phantom, no threat in real terms. He could never impregnate Gaia, or give her a disease, or boast of cuckolding me to my business partners, or ever take her away from me.

What it really came down to was the mental image, provoking jealousy at a deep, gut level. Jealousy based on ancient drives a
civilized
man should be able to overcome.

I was no longer sure I wanted to be a civilized man.

No, I didn't get roaring drunk, or provoke a fight with the big guy two stools down. I thought about it, but what the hell? By now I was much too skilled at killing to trust myself in a friendly brawl, out in the real world. Anyway, my neighbor also looked as if he worked out. Maybe, for exercise,
he
took scalps with Cochise, or rode with a VR Genghis Khan. Under our gray urban disguises, we can all be dangerous mysteries.

I paid up and left.

Gaia was dozing on the couch when I got back, or pretending to be. She seemed relieved to have me home, and I tried not to show my inner turmoil. I turned on the TV wall, and she, sensing it wiser, went to bed.

Half an hour later I slipped into my bodysuit and reentered my private world.

Weeks passed, Gaia grew larger. We spoke little.

My consulting firm finally won the Taiko Tech account, worth millions. I rushed home and celebrated with Ankle by first killing a lion, then making love by a cool bend in the river. We lay together, listening to locusts and the wind in the swaying branches, while a dry heat seemed to suck all the dank, fetid odors of the office out of my skin. Tension at work had left knots up and down my spine, which Ankle worked out with her strong hands.

She listened quietly to my recitation of setbacks and victories in the corporate world, clearly understanding none of it. That didn't matter. My VR people knew and accepted that their chief spent most of his time far away, in the Land of Gods. In a way, Ankle was the perfect, uncritical sounding board.

If only it had been that simple dealing with the hanging, unspoken tension between me and Gaia. Ankle would have listened to that, too, but what was there to say? The whole thing was preposterous and my fault. Why should it bother me what my wife did in fantasy play?

It did bother me.

It was starting to split us apart.

"I want to show you something," Ankle announced, picking up her clothes and evading my grasp. "Come," she urged. "Long Stick can send some boys for the lion. There is something nearby you must see."

I shrugged into my tunic. "What is it?"

She only smiled and motioned for me to follow. Still wrestling to lace my moccasins, I tried to keep up as she led me toward a forested rise. It lay in the direction of "Camp," the fictitious home base I had never seen during all of my workouts with small groups of hunters. It would have taken so much computing power to process a full tribe that it simply never occurred to me to journey in this direction.

We reached the top of the rise and soon picked up faint sounds . . . human voices, talking and laughing. We approached stealthily, crawling the last few meters to peer over a steep bluff. There we saw, a couple of hundred meters downslope, a small gathering of people clustered around an oak tree. They were using tall poles to bat away at an object high in the branches. Occasionally, one of them dropped her pole and hopped about, swatting at the air while others laughed.

Gatherers
, I realized.
Going after a beehive
. This was my first glimpse of the other half of my "tribe." Calmly, I noted that many were accompanied by children . . . and that one of the unaccompanied ones was decidedly pregnant. . . .

My breath suddenly caught as I recognized the rotund, laughing figure.

All this time Gaia and I had played in our own pretend Neolithic worlds and never guessed they were different parts of the same tribe!

It hadn't started out that way. We had bought our original programs separately. But in retrospect it seemed an obvious thing for the computer to do . . . to save memory space by pooling our adventures in the same metaphorical landscape.

"It affects us," Ankle said.

"Who?"

"Your folk." She motioned toward the gatherers, slapped her own chest, and waved toward the east, where the hunting parties roamed. "It hurts us."

"What hurts you?" I asked, perplexed, distracted.

"The break . . . the pain between you two."

I was too confused, too curious about this new turn of events to follow what she was saying. I peered at the figures below and saw two
men
among the women down there, helping to steal honey. Just as some women could be hunters, certain males might choose the rites and rhythms of gathering. Probably one of them was my rival, Gaia's synthetic paramour.

Suddenly it seemed important to get closer. But as I made ready, Ankle stopped me.

"You cannot," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Certain charms are needed. To unite us. Unite the tribe."

"Charms?"

She nodded. "From the Land of Gods."

After a pause. ". . . Oh, I get it."

She meant more memory, much more. Until recently I had hunted with just one companion, then ten or so. Joining the two simulated worlds, depicting several score personified characters, would take more power than our house console possessed.

But that was no problem! I had a big raise coming. I could go right out and buy the chips on credit! My fist clenched in anticipation. By this time tomorrow I'd get a much closer look at the bastard who . . .

Suddenly the laughter below broke under a single, warbling cry. One of the women dropped her pole and doubled over in agony, clutching her swollen abdomen.

I didn't stop to think. With a bellow I came to my feet, running downhill toward the petite form writhing amid a cluster of anxious women. "Gaia!" I cried, frustrated that the ground grew tarry with each step. The gatherers, too, seemed to blur around the edges as I neared, one heavy step at a time. The earth trembled and Ankle clutched my arm.

"Not that way!" she screamed, cringing as I whirled in anger. "Oh, Chief, you must go!" She slapped the side of her head, then pointed to mine. "Go
back
!"

Damn the realism of it all!

Cursing, I tore off the helmet, gashing my cheek with the strap. The bodysuit still formed a matrix of otherworld sensations—hot savanna wind and gritty moccasins. But abruptly my eyes saw a tiny off-white chamber, its coarse floor mimicking a steep hillside. Sense-conflict made me sway in confusion as I dived for the door.

I'm coming, Gaia!" I cried, stumbling into the hallway in haste to reach my wife.

They're making a big deal out of it. I've been interviewed. There is even talk of reviving childbirth classes for husbands. But it's all silly, of course. Any other man would've done the same in a crisis.

I have my wife and son. What else matters?

Tommy thrives as his stim-crib eases him from synthetic womb-sounds into the gaudy, greater world. He will grow up here in Chitown . . . and on Mars. In an Indian village, and ancient Greece, and a Neolithic clan. He'll run through forests, to know what we've lost. As a teenager he'll fulfill fantasies lads of my time could but imagine.

And if he gets too big a head from being a prince in a dozen virtualities? Well, even his generation will learn to tell what's real.
Reality
is what still hurts when you take the suit off.

As for Gaia and me, we found ways to assuage my male pride, once our tribes united. Each of us still plays with personae now and then—who could resist? But always we come home to each other.

Virtuality is fun—it's good to be the chief—but nothing matches the sweetness of her skin, her breath, or the wonderful unpredictability of her real mind.

My blood pressure is low. My arteries are squeaky clean and muscles wiry, strong. I stay a little hungry, like my ancestors, and may live past a hundred. In a cramped world of twelve billion souls, I can run for hours seeing no one but gazelles, or a lonely hawk.

Lions know to give me a wide berth.

Give me time. I'm even learning to like termites.

It annoyed Io's best friend to give birth to a four-kilo cylinder of tightly wound, medium grade, placental solvent filters.

For five long months Perseph had kept to a diet free of sugar, sniff, or tobac—well, almost free. The final ten weeks she'd spent waddling around in the bedouin drapery fashion decreed for pieceworkers this year. And all that for maybe two thousand dollars' worth of industrial sieves little better than a fabricow might produce!

Perseph was really ticked.

Outwardly, Io made all the right sympathetic sounds, though actually she had little use for her friend's anger. It had been Perseph's choice to hire her womb to a freelance codder of dubious pedigree, without even vetting him through an agent.

"They're all sperm crazy," Io had warned months earlier, as the two of them sat together on her narrow con-apt balcony.

"There's no profit in placental jobbing, and no hope for advancement," Io told Perseph that evening. "Me, I'll stick to eggwork."

"But eggs jobs cost you to get started," Perseph complained. "And a failure can ruin you with nondelivery charges.
Then
where's your investment?"

As if Perseph knew what the word meant! Like most pieceworkers, the tall brunette never saved a penny out of her delivery fees, blowing it all on the move-party circuit until it was time to return to her dole checks and her next surropregnancy. No wonder Perseph stayed with placental-fab. Some people just had no ambition.

Io vividly recalled that evening, several months ago, when the two of them watched silent marsh fog diffuse raggedly over the muddy riverbanks into Ellesmere Port's cattle yards, softening the complacent lowing of the animals, if not their pungent aroma.

Twenty-four hours a day lorries pulled out from the milking sheds and parturition barns, carrying bulk loads of gene-designed oils, polymers, and industrial membranes. The mass production of specially bred fabricows dwarfed the output of small-time contractors like Perseph or Io. Rumor had it ICI housed their pampered creatures here on the south bank to intimidate the pieceworkers living in derelict marinas and towering co-op houseboats nearby.

If so, the cattle yards had the opposite effect on Io. They boosted her morale, reminding her that there were still some things neither animals nor machines could do as well as a human craftswoman. No fabricow would ever produce wares as fine as hers!

That evening, months ago, Io's friend had only just begun her latest surropreg and still yearned passionately for the chemical pleasures now denied her by guild rules. Of course, soon Perseph would be substituting a mellow high from her own hormonal flow. Meanwhile, though, she made pretty miserable company.

"Nawi, Io. I don't think I could hold out long enough to do eggwork. It takes so long, I'd go crazy for a party."

"But Pers, look what Technique Zaire's paying for a prime cockatrice these days. Or a shipbrain—"

"A shipbrain! Hah! How'd a piece like me ever get seeded with a shipbrain? If
I
ever signed up for eggwork, they'd knock me up with . . . with a traffic cop!" Perseph laughed, a sound Io felt had grown more bitter of late.